Olympia Gardens
Sixty years of cultivating beauty, community, and stories
A community-rooted botanical garden in the Pacific Northwest — 150 acres of curated landscapes, year-round programming, and a quiet conviction that nature belongs to everyone.
Our Story
From ten acres of forgotten orchard
Olympia Gardens began in 1962 as a few sketches on the back of a botanical journal. Margaret Lindholm — a horticulturist, garden designer, and lifelong evangelist for Pacific Northwest native plants — bought ten acres of forgotten orchard south of Olympia and started planting.
By the time she retired in 1989, she’d grown those ten acres into a regional treasure — 150 acres of curated landscapes, a working conservatory, and a community of volunteers who planted thousands of trees and tens of thousands of bulbs alongside her. Six decades later, much of what you see when you walk through our gates traces back to her sketches.
Our Mission
We grow more than gardens. We grow connection — between people, between generations, and between communities and the landscapes that shape them.
Heritage
The Conservatory has been here longer than most of us
The Conservatory of Tropical Plants opened in 1971 and has remained more or less unchanged. Its wrought-iron skeleton, hand-puttied glass panels, and vintage cedar potting tables are the heart of our preservation practice.
Walk through and you’ll meet plants Margaret raised from cuttings she carried home from a 1973 expedition to Costa Rica — still thriving, still propagated by hand by the same team that’s tended them for fifty years.
Leadership
The people who keep the gardens growing
Eleanor Whitaker
Executive Director
Twenty years in nonprofit leadership. Joined Olympia Gardens in 2019 from the Seattle Parks Foundation.
Robert Tremaine
Head Horticulturalist
On staff for 31 years. Has personally planted or mentored every cedar in the forest grove.
Ayana Caldwell
Director of Education
Designs the school programs that bring 12,000 K–12 students through the gardens each year.
Daniel Park
Director of Operations
Keeps the gates open and the tickets flowing. Former operations lead at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.
150
Acres of cultivated gardens
3,500
Plant species
60+
Years of stewardship
18,000
Members & counting